Page - 59 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

The WEB Effect and Dilemmas There is little debate on whether the internet1 has affected society. There is however substantial debate on the modalities and the extent to which the internet is transforming our social structure. Gainous and Wagner (2014), while offering a social critique of the internet investigated various social dilemmas that are a consequence of the internet. They have examined the implications of the internet on: 1) techno-ethics of information technology in a digital society; 2) cyber-activism and potential failures in enhancing political institutions; 3) social cognition in the age of social networking; 4) requirements in informed consent for individuals participating in testing in the realm of scientific research; 5) web impact on political issues viz., election campaigns, political communication and public opinion; and 6) the dilemmas encountered in data sharing during academic research. David Souter (2012) observed that while the internet had enhanced the netizens’ ability to exercise the basic human rights of freedom of expression, assembly, association and information, it had also led to new ways in which certain rights can be infringed: “ …changes in expression, association and privacy, together with other societal changes resulting from the internet, have disrupted historic understandings of the relationships or balances between some rights within the international human rights regime... particularly so where new forms of expression and new scope for expression have enabled violations of protective rights such as those concerned with security, defamation, hate speech, discrimination, and child protection. In some cases, these relationships or balances may be fundamentally reshaped.” Akesson et al (2014) propose a large scale and inter-disciplinary approach to social and ethical challenges in the digital ecosystem – especially in instances with underlying conflict of interest. The conflict of interest of interests manifests itself in several ways globally; the nature of that conflict is diverse, yet distinctly local in its form and content. The concept of a social dilemmas itself has been described by Kollock (1998) as “situations in which individual rationality leads to collective irrationality”. In characterizing a dilemma he writes that “a group of people facing a social dilemma may completely understand the situation, may appreciate how each of their actions contribute to a disastrous outcome, and still be unable to do anything about it”. He has proposed several solutions to social dilemmas. Salient amongst these involve value orientation, communication, group reciprocity, social learning and even social structural changes after the cause has been identified. This paper attempts to resolve the social dilemma of the internet through a framework based on value identification, risk analysis, and judicious deployment of controls. The basic premise is that value systems vary as per divergent social structures. The manner in which these divergent social structures respond to disruptive 1 The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally. The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information and services over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. In this paper, the terms WWW and internet are used interchangeably. 59